Preferred the 1997 miniseries in fundamental ways

My rating: 50%

Published 2026-8-31

Beware of spoilers.

I preferred aspects of the 1997 miniseries (which I watched as a kid) and vice versa. To keep things brief since I’m sure many others have already noted positive aspects, I’ll touch upon the former here. I’m highlighting these because these were enough to lower my rating of the film substantially.

1. The sea monsters Charybdis and Scylla are not really present in Nolan’s film. Charybdis, a huge monster with teeth in the 1997 series as it’s supposed to be, has literally been replaced by a whirlpool in Nolan’s film. A WHIRLPOOL. There is no monster. Scylla was also given way more screentime and formidability in the 1997 series, both in appearance and the setting in which they appear. Check it out, the whole miniseries is available on YouTube for free.
2. Casting in the 1997 series made more sense in general. Including the lead. Matt Damon has zero charisma as Odysseus. He also just doesn’t look like how Odysseus should look; Armand Assante was much more believable. Damon should stick to Jason Bourne. When I first watched the trailer and saw that Damon plays Odysseus, things were already starting to not gel. On the flip side, it makes Odysseus’s crew’s growing dislike of him particularly believable.
3. Odysseus is supposed to be unrecognizable as a beggar. The disguise was done well in the 1997 series. In Nolan’s film, there is no disguise. Instead, Damon looks the same. No one who isn’t blind would miss it. His son Telemachus’s excuse for not recognizing him initially is he was a toddler when Odysseus left for the Trojan War. And Eumaeus’s excuse is he is blind, but it’s surprising his attuned hearing wasn’t able to pick that up since Damon sounded exactly the same too. It seems the rest of the time, a production choice was made for Damon to hide completely in his robe, like the Grim Reaper, to work around this glaring issue, with Penelope apparently not questioning this at all or asking to see his face while she and Odysseus spoke at length.
4. Penelope locking Odysseus in a room with 100 guys (give or take) most of whom want him dead, makes no sense as character motivation and was a decision unique to the Nolan film. In the original story and 1997 miniseries she’s not even present or aware at this point. “OMG my husband whom I dearly love and want back alive and well has finally returned after 20 years! My first move is to lock him up with all these guys who want him dead! I’ll see if he survives! LOLZ!” I see this film is part comedy.
5. The one part throughout the entire film with any potential emotional weight, where Odysseus’s unwell dog Argos finally dies after seeing Odysseus one last time when he returns as a beggar, was relatively glossed over. The rest of the film did nothing to make one care for any of the characters. This relates back to the general charisma and believability of the casting choices touched in #2.
6. Pacing was uneven at points, with odd edits. One example that stood out to me was the scene on Aeaea (the animal island). Odysseus’s crew are choking heavily on their food and soon transformed into pigs. After Odysseus figures it out and the witch Circe starts changing them back, it abruptly cuts to the crew fully back in their armor walking merrily out of the house as if nothing had happened. Very sudden transition, like they cut out the wrong 10-20 seconds to shorten the film.

This isn’t it. IMHO Nolan hasn’t topped Inception. Oppenheimer was fine but boring at times. And after the massive overhype of the horror film Obsession, I feel like the general public’s judgment has become (more) questionable and/or bots are increasingly becoming a part of the equation to artificially ramp up film rankings. Just gotta ignore the noise.

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